


Time and Family

by FaintingInCoils



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-29
Updated: 2013-07-31
Packaged: 2017-12-21 17:32:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/902963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FaintingInCoils/pseuds/FaintingInCoils
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos is still confused about time in Night Vale.  He tries to figure out just how long, exactly, Cecil was in Europe... and learns a few other things about him, as well.<br/>References through episode 21, 'A Memory of Europe.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Time in Europe

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by an anonymous post on the nightvaleheadcanons Tumblr that said this:
> 
> "Piggybacking off of adoptive parent!Cecil headcanon, his child is college aged and is currently studying abroad. Cecil hasn’t mentioned them because he made a blood pact not to pine or worry about them over the airwaves while they’re gone (due to Cecil’s habit of detailing his entire personal life on the show)."
> 
> I'm going to run on this, so there will be more of this version of Cecil's life from me later.

 “Cecil... I was thinking about your trip to Europe,” Carlos says one night. They are seated across from one another in a tiny booth in the Moonlight All-Night Diner, waiting for their pie.

Cecil brightens immediately, his skin losing some of the ashen pallor it's taken on recently. “Oh?” he says excitedly, voice like quickly rising bubbles. “Do you want to go? I've always thought of returning for a while one day, and they say there's no time like the--”

“No!” Carlos protests, more sharply than he intended. He clears his throat, attempts a smile, and tries again. “Uhhm, that is, I'd love to go one day—with you—but right now isn't... That is, it's not the best...” This isn't helping. Deep breath. “At any rate, no, that's not what I was going to ask. I have a question for you. About the trip. And Night Vale, when you were gone.”

Cecil's smile dims slightly but doesn't go out. It's never gone out, at least not around Carlos, although he thinks it probably does sometimes when he isn't around. “Oh. Well then, go ahead. This could be interesting. Nobody ever interviews _me_.”

He's got that thing happening with his voice where he sounds reminiscent of a sullen child, and Carlos knows by now that this means he'll have to work quickly if he really wants to know. It's so difficult, though, because he and words have never gotten along well; they're so subtle and loaded and fickle and dangerous, but... But he'll try anyway, to satisfy his curiosity, and maybe to inspire some new studies that he and his team can conduct. “Well, it's about _time_ , you see,” he says at last, pushing the words out to interrupt the distant look and silly—but endearing—smile forming on Cecil's face, that same look he gets every time Carlos goes still or silent for too long.

“Time?” Cecil echoes, the corners of his mouth twitching up, then down, his eyebrows doing the same thing. This must not have been the question he was expecting. “I'm sorry, Carlos, but I'm not sure what you're asking.”

Of course not. Poorly done. If only they were in the lab, with a list of prepared questions... No. Just try again. “Yes, time. That is, ah... How long were you in Europe, exactly? You only said that you rolled down that hill for what couldn't have been more than a decade, but that... I'm sorry. I know you're a journalist, but that _doesn't make sense_.”

He waits for anger, but Cecil only cocks his head slightly to the side. The waitress appears with the pie, sets it silently on the table and leaves. “Of course it makes sense, my dear, beautiful Carlos. But perhaps it doesn't make sense because you aren't from Night Vale. What's confusing you?”

“Time!” Carlos says, almost _howls_ , only he's learned that's the City Council's communication method of choice and that it's probably best not to step on their toes, so to speak. “How long ago, exactly, did you go to Europe?” he prompts, forcing his voice and nerves alike to calm down so he can ask things nicely.

“Well... that was spring break of my senior year of college,” Cecil replies slowly, his eyes losing their shine and going oddly dark—very dark, pitch dark—for a moment as he thinks. “That was the same year I got an invitation to be an intern at the station, which makes that...” He blinks, and his eyes are back to their normal gloss and color. Or, no. They had been brown, and now they are blue, but at least they no longer look like tiny bubbling tar pools. What color had they been when Carlos had first met him?

“That was sixteen years ago in Night Vale,” Cecil says, and the thought collapses, unimportant.

“Sixteen years ago... _in Night Vale_ ,” Carlos repeats, and swallows the first three things he wants to say in response. Perfectly sensible, all of them, but Cecil would find them ridiculous, in the same way that he—and all the citizens of Night Vale—would find them ridiculous.

“Yes,” Cecil says with a nod. “I interned with the station for a year once I returned from Europe. I'd just gotten my five year anniversary present from the station when I met Emily, and they don’t' count internships towards those. And Emily's been with me for ten years now. So that's ten, five, and one. Sixteen years, yes.” He smiles oh-so-brightly, looks so proud of himself for keeping such good track of time. Carlos is duly impressed, as the only reason he can keep track of time, especially here in this strange town, is by looking at the dates on his lab notes.

“Sixteen years.” Carlos makes a note of it on his phone, wishing—not for the first time—that there wasn't that ridiculous ban on pens and pencils. If he wasn't so busy with the earthquakes and the clocks, he would just make himself a non-pen, like Cecil has talked about on the radio once, but that will have to wait.

“In Night Vale,” Cecil prompts, and looks at his phone expectantly. Carlos types the three words and then looks back up, straight into Cecil's eyes. A dark pink flush appears across Cecil's cheeks, and immediately disappears. Or, no. He has a tan now, a deep enough tan to disguise the flush, and _how is that possible?_ Carlos's brain shifts from time to pigmentation for a moment, starting to sift through facts rapid-pace. “It was much longer, I think, in Europe. In anywhere else at all.”

And Carlos is back to time immediately. When has skin pigmentation ever mattered to him, after all? _Never_. “How do you know that?”

Cecil shrugs. He takes a sip of his coffee, makes a face, and adds a sprinkling of salt. When the next sip is more to his liking he says, “It's the newspapers that tipped us off. I went to Europe the spring after the USSR was dissolved. I came back for the fall semester, and one of the first reports on national news I made for the college radio station was about Princess Diana's death. We were all very shocked, of course, but not a single one of us had even heard that she and Charles had divorced. Not even Old Woman Josie knew, and she followed all the tabloids and gossip columns, even back then. She didn't even know that they were _separated_. It was all very surprising indeed.”

Carlos isn't sure what to say to all that, so he merely nods and begins to eat his blueberry-lemon pie. He uses his free hand to do a quick series of searches on his phone to confirm the time-line he is forming. The waitress brings more coffee, and Cecil begins to fidget across the table. He, unlike Carlos, is not comfortable with silence, and not breaking it is probably a struggle.

“That's five years, Cecil,” Carlos says at last. His throat is dry, but the coffee is horrible, and he still hasn't convinced himself to drink tap water in Night Vale. There are still a few more tests he's yet to run on it before he's certain it's safe for an outside who hasn't grown up drinking it.

Cecil nods and leans forward. “I think it comes out to one week in Night Vale for every year out there, now that I think about it.”  
“That makes you forty-two, then,” Carlos muses, and is surprised that this—the least important revelation of this conversation—is what concerns him the most.

Cecil looks offended, his mouth making an 'o' of horror or shock. His teeth look longer, slimmer, pointier, than they were when he'd smiled earlier. “I most certainly am not! Oh, yes, I aged in Europe, but those years fell off the moment I came back to Night Vale. The town didn't like that I'd aged, I don't think.” Cecil attacks the last bite of pike left on his place, teeth clicking loudly around the last morsels of goat cheese, spinach, and flaky, buttery crust. “Besides. If I were forty-two, I wouldn’t have to work so hard at one day achieving death, now would I?” He pushes his empty plate to the side and adds primly, “Every year helps, you know, never mind what Old Woman Josie says on the matter.”

Death in Night Vale is one of those topics that makes Carlos especially uncomfortable, even more so than what he is about to do. He reaches across the table, takes Cecil's hands in his own, and squeezes gently. “Of course,” he says. “Age is only a number, and you're trying very hard. Your age makes absolutely no difference on my opinion of you.”

Cecil's eyes are green now, bright green; his skin a shade darker than Carlos's own; and his hands suddenly feel... smaller, but heavier, more solid, like his bones have remembered they have a purpose and are preparing themselves for something. None of which should be possible.

“You're so _sweet_!” Cecil says, soft but clearly delighted. His voice, at least, is the same. His voice _never_ changes, it's always so perfectly comforting...

No. Those other changes, they happened, he's sure of it. He has to ask. “Cecil,” he begins, and then without meaning to, “Who's Emily?”

One eye stays green, the other shifts to brown, and the smile on his face is not one that Carlos has ever seen before. His stomach drops a little. “Oh, that's right. I'm not supposed to mention her on the radio while she's gone, so you wouldn't know. She's my daughter!”

Carlos can feel his own pigmentation changing, his face getting paler, but in the usual way of any person whose blood finds itself unfond of faces. He tugs one hand free and drains his untouched cup of cold, horrible coffee, then whispers into it, “Check please.”

After all, a man can only be expected to handle so many surprises in one night.


	2. When Cecil Met Emily

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cecil thinks back to the day he first met his daughter.

 Cecil is not sure what to do about Carlos. He considers calling Emily—as a young woman freshly out of her teens, she has been known to give everyone in her social circle unprompted advice on their love lives, despite an almost utter lack of actual experience on her part—but decides against it, at least for now. It would be unfair, he thinks, to make her analyze his relationship with a man she's never met. Or even heard of, actually, given that he and Emily have established a strict “emergency contact and reporting of grades only” policy while she is away at college. Or rather, Emily established the policy, and Cecil often regrets going along with it, but he's always been a notoriously soft touch where his daughter is concerned.

Part of it is that he loves her. He really, truly does. And part of it is that Emily is a true master of the art of batting eyelashes. But there is also the fact that Cecil is slightly scared of his daughter. Not all the time, but... some of the time. He is less scared of her than he is of Station Management, which is the important thing. And if he is honest with himself, his fearfulness seems to be mostly unfounded. Ten years together and she's never maimed him or sold any of his small, dog-farmed replacement organs. And she will be invaluable if he ever has any personal issues with the Hooded Figures, which is more than can be said of anyone else in Night Vale.

Oh, yes. Emily had proven herself useful on that front the day they had first met...

 

\---

 

Cecil had just finished reporting on the destruction caused by a bloody skirmish between the Night Vale Association of Homeowners Against Individuality, and the Craft Supplies Make Better People Foundation, when an unusually fearful-looking intern entered the room. The young woman had handed him a sheet of paper bearing the stamp of the Sheriff's Secret Police; a small crayon drawing of a house engulfed in flames; and the words “the time has come for civic duty to rear its monstrous, sticky-faced head” hastily scrawled in what could have been blood, or could have been tomato sauce, but was most definitely _not_ red ink. Cecil, like every grown citizen of Night Vale, knew what this meant. He was to report to the Night Vale Orphanage and Abandoned Pet Shelter immediately, as mandated by city law. Cecil cut to a generic prerecorded message stating that he had Official City-Mandated Business to attend to, queued up a calming play list of hyena laughter and the sounds of shattering glass to reassure his listeners that all was well, then headed straight to the orphanage.

He was amazed—and, admittedly, more than a little horrified—to find the lobby empty save for two entities: a Hooded Figure, and a cross-looking little girl. More specifically, it was the Hooded Figure who typically went around _taking_ children, which made his presence especially unexpected. He was backed up against a heavy wooden desk. The girl brought to mind a dying ember: ashen skin, dark orange eyes that seemed to glow, and coal-black hair in dozens of braids, all of which were squirming and writhing madly atop her head. She was jabbing the Hooded Figure halfheartedly with the spear-tip end of a purple stick horse.

Cecil stood, frozen and silent, in the doorway for what felt like minutes, but may have been much longer... or may have been only seconds. At last the Hooded Figure floated upward, above the extended reach of the little girl, and towards Cecil, emanating a steady buzz of pink noise all the while. The Hooded Figure gestured rapidly from Cecil to the girl and back again, increased the volume of its staticky exclamations, and vanished.

“Good,” the little girl said immediately, glaring at the spot where the Hooded Figure had been. “He was no fun at all.” Her voice was like a quill scratching across sandpaper. She walked toward Cecil, waving her stick horse in front of her threateningly. “Who are you, then?”

Cecil shook himself slightly, pleased to feel the short hairs on his neck and arms lying back down now that the Hooded Figure was gone. “I'm Cecil Palmer,” he said.

The little girl's eyes focused on her face with a flare of color, and her braids stood up straight and swiveled so that the tips faced him. “You're on the radio!” she said excitedly, her voice now like the sound of coins rattling into a large glass bowl: tinkling and high, low and rattling, the two tones blending together. It was the most beautiful voice Cecil had ever heard, and his heart swelled with love for this little girl who was now his daughter.

“I am,” he said. “Who are you?”

“I'm Emily,” the girl said, and then her voice went back to scratches. “Emily Palmer now, I suppose... My parents were decapitated by steel-edged wreathes.” She sighed, and it sounded like a snake slithering through sand, and Cecil—for all that he had double-minored in dark arts and sound engineering—simply could not understand how one voice box could make so many wondrous and perfect sounds. “I'll miss them, of course, but they only have themselves to blame. A world without hand-crafted decorations is no world worth living in. I don't know how they thought otherwise.”

Cecil nodded solemnly. His loyalties were with the Craft side of the struggle as well. “We can dress as them during this year's Thanksgiving Day Dead Citizens Impersonation Contest, if you'd like,” he said, stepping forward and patting Emily gently on one arm. “It will give you a wholesome sense of both closure and irony when we sew and wear the costumes together.”

Emily smiled at him, the look marred slightly by the sickly tint of her face, but earnest all the same. “Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate the thought.” A thoughtful expression crossed her features, and then, “May we please go to the station before we get my things? I'd really love to see where you work, Cecil.”

A strand of Cecil's hair, which had been growing nervously throughout their meeting and by this point reached past his knees, whipped out of place on its own. It curled lovingly around a few of Emily's now peacefully swaying braids. “Of course,” he said. “I have a very important announcement with your name on it.”   


End file.
